Despite spending most of our time within arm’s reach of our phones, many of us dread actually making or answering a call. Phone call anxiety also known as telephone phobia is the fear or avoidance of phone conversations. How is this developed in people?
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Anxiety is a form of phobia, personally I hate phone calls. I’d literally watch my phone find just to text you moments later what you intended to tell me on the call. I believe I can handle shocking news when it’s in texts than when it’s said directly to me. I guess I developed this anxiety due to the following;
Nobody calls to tell me good news. It is always bad news or something I have to attend to, and I already have too much to do. So a phone ringing is hell to me.
I hate small talk. Talking on the phone usually involves this.
My father is very ill so I am always in a state of high alert when the phone rings because he probably has a problem.
Phone calls are inefficient. Texting is much better. It doesn’t involve small talk. You can cut to the chase. Texting forces people to be concise, which is good. When someone texts “Call me” I roll my eyes. “Can’t you fucking write?” If you cannot express your concerns in an email or a text then I don’t want to deal with you.
Personally I hate phone calls and they cause me a certain amount of stress. I am used to consciously and unconsciously reading the hundreds of little social cues that the other person gives in a face-to-face conversation (how they are feeling, how they react to new data or do they already know all the details), and the lack of that information feels horrible. I get the same feeling when talking to people who wear sunglasses. Emails are a lot easier because they lack the real time element and you can more carefully read both the original mail as well as your reply. For me the only way was to get used to speaking on the phone to people I talk to in normal face-to-face conversations because I already could read a lot from their tone of voice and inflections. I still hate the voice part of my phone though and tend to ignore numbers that I don’t recognize— look for an app called TrueCaller, it helps figure out who is calling you at any time.